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Life writing

June 10, 2013

The letters of Italo Calvino have recently been published in a translation by Martin McLaughlin, and were reviewed in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago:

The bulk of the correspondence in this collection concerns Calvino's tireless work on behalf of Einaudi and his struggle to succeed as a writer in post-fascist Italy. Along the way are letters sent to fellow Italian writers (Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante) in support of abortion and workers rights, as well as bulletins dispatched from 50s New York and Communist Cuba (where Calvino met Che Guevara). The correspondence is distinguished by its sly philosophic humour and mandarin diversity of interests, ranging from the chivalric romances of Charlemagne to French structuralist theory.

Above all, the letters illuminate the politics of book publishing in Italy after the overthrow of Mussolini. Calvino's first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), was born directly out of his experience as a partisan during Italy's anti-fascist resistance. It was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Italy's "news-reel" school of realism, which aimed for an unpolished immediacy of the street. Hemingway served as an antidote to fascist rhetoric and obfuscation. Yet Calvino's writing was already marked by a fabulous gothic undertow, with allusions to medieval artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Atldorfer. In his letters, he styles himself both "the fabulist Calvino" and "the realist Calvino": which was the real one?

The novelist and poet Cesare Pavese, Einaudi's managing editor, was among the first to detect the virtuoso fable-maker in Calvino. The 24-year-old was a "squirrel with a quill", Pavese said, whose fiction read like a "folk tale from the forests".

April 15, 2013

Ron Hogan, a stalwart of the US book blogging scene, has launched a video recommendations site called The Handsell, which will match different authors and publishers with readers every month. Via Melville House.

If you want to know what she is doing in this picture, you'd better catch the show before it finishes this week.

Melbourne writer, editor and reviewer Jo Case was interviewed on Life Matters at the ABC last week, so listen here to her talk about her memoir on parenting her child with Asperger's. Boomer and Me is life-writing I have been very eager to read, particularly as some of it took shape on a blog I used to read a lot, not so long ago. Here's the first chapter, courtesy of the publishers. Congratulations Jo!

As well as being a well-known published writer, Jane Gleeson-White is such a fine blogger! one of the few soloists out there now writing longer posts for us, and I am saving up these beautiful posts on a lecture recently given by Margaret Wertheim for later. I think you would love them too.

October 13, 2012

The influence of Joyce is everywhere in O'Brien's work, and her discussion of his style is a manifesto for her own: "the lush descriptions of corpses and steers and pigs and kine, and sea and sea stones, and then the extraordinary ascensions in which worlds within worlds unfolded." He was such a girl, Joyce.

Mailer might have found him too interior, though he would never have kissed him, shyly, in a church in Brooklyn while sheltering from the rain. It was a funny time, the late 20th century, when men wrote like men, and women wrote like women, and then everybody said mean things about who was right and who was just whoring around. And if you ask me, it wasn't Edna.

-Anne Enright has reviewed the memoirs of Edna O'Brien, for the Guardian, and her conclusions are informative and celebratory.

May 10, 2010

The writer Thomas Mann, responding by letter to a young James Lord, wrote that he possessed ‘the gift of admiration’ which ‘above all enables a talented person to learn’.

And learn he did, from Picasso and Dora Maar no less, going on to write a famous memoir that stifled the success of his fiction:

Lord’s fiction was cursed by the perception that his own life contained a cast of characters more compelling than any he could compose. And yet paradoxically, it was his ability to render these illuminating figures in prose with both autobiographical precision and virtuosic flair to which Lord, in part, owes his reputation as a writer.

This profile of James Lord by Ted Hodgkinson is at Granta Online, where an extract from Lord's memoir (which is also printed in Granta 110:Sex) will be up on Friday.

April 14, 2010

These days when I wake, inexplicably, between 4 and 5, which is most
mornings, I read, I worry, but if that does not work, I bake. The kitchen is a changed place in the wee hours,
its clicks and hummings are louder, the pots and pans make a deafening
clatter when I pull them out of the cupboard. But, as before, I am
relaxed, my sense of smell is sharper. As I measure and weigh, I am more
patient than during waking hours. I’ve always turned to flour and
butter when I can’t sleep.

Looking further into the insomnia blog All-Nighters at the New York Times, after reading a post by John Williams at The Second Pass recently, I found this lovely piece of writing by Leanne Shapton, who still wakes at the hour she went to swimming training as a child (that's 4.25 a.m., bright and early enough for you?). Instead of worrying or reading, she often bakes. There's a recipe or two, and an ending to test any sleep doctor.

December 09, 2009

It can't possibly be almost the end of the year, can it? Christmas shopping is in progress.In that spirit there's a list of top reads from the past year after the jump, in no particular order other than abecedarian, arranged by type.

If you're still hungry for selections and suggestions after trawling through mine, there are other lists, by other people, covering all five (six?) Readings stores and beyond. And there's a very comprehensive US/international roundup at The Millions, of course. I might not be back for a little while, as there's plenty of good book news around - follow the blogs here (scroll down for the feeds) and you won't be bored.

What I want for Christmas: Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier, Lorrie Moore'sA Gate at the Stairs, botanical prints I've had framed, which will be ready to pick up next Friday, a bottle of brandy and a month's supply of Zero lemonade.

(If you cannot read that bio on Austlit because you are not a subscriber, you should be able to join using a public library card, or a State Library one. Or you can read this older bio by Laurie Clancy, with some good notes on her books, which does not include her latest publication, The Bone House.)

One of my favourite books is Farmer's collection of diary extracts and short stories, collected mainly around their writing, A Body Of Water. There is a story about a Buddhist retreat in that volume, complete with a diary account of the retreat, that provides a magnificent study in how to render fiction out of memory.

Farmer is a prose poet in many ways - from her notes from October in that book comes this account of reading at Mietta's, a fine restaurant with literary leanings, at some time in the eighties:

Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. I read a story in the "Readings with Readings" program in the Lounge at Mietta's, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers - heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light of wineglasses.

At seven o'clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

In the livid night sky - never black in Carlton - a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

Further up that page, she writes of a house she had rented by the coast, somewhere near Lorne:

Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and dunes you go down onto the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-splattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there's not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging - still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

From A Body Of Water, UQP: 1990, p.188 (the one with the Matisse painting on the cover, yesss. Iss mine, preciousss.) A volume of Farmer's longer, meditative essays on art and life, The Bone House, is available from Giramondo. I don't know how many of her other books are in print - her Collected Storieshave been on school reading lists from time to time. She spoke with Clive Hamilton and Alfred Yuson on Radio National's Book Show on the art of the essay in 2006 and a podcast is still available, here. I have also found an essay in Island from 2005, 'The Dog Of The Work', in my travels...Enjoy.

October 17, 2009

But I cannot resist notifying you of these podcasts of treasure from Radio National - has the programming there been sensational this week or what?

CAN HAZ Gerald Murnane, the writer of Tamarisk Row, The Plainsand his latest book Barley Patch, on fiction for an hour (PURE GOLD) and Sonu Shamdasani, the editor of Jung's Red Bookfor twenty minutes? THOSE BASES BELONG TO US thanks to the national broadcaster and Team Koval. Thanks to Peter Mares for both interviews - regrettably the Shamdasani interview has doubtful sound quality, so it will be easier to deal with when the transcript is up in a week or so.

Thanks to Giramondo I have already read Barley Patch, and what can I say? so much more to digest and think about regarding this thing we call fiction. I bought two volumes of his stories (out of print) from AbeBooks for myself for an extra birthday present. Velvet waters, indeed. And he mentions in the radio show that he has completed a novella, A History of Books, so I hope we will see that sometime soon as well.

Barley Patch is provocative, teasing, bracing, all sorts of good things. Suffice it to say that upon finishing it, I started in on Vikram Seth's An Equal Music with the sense that I was seeing everything through the cleanest of clear windows. The Seth felt baroquely messy, and I was hearing all kinds of annoying things, including pastiche, even after I realigned my ears and eyes. So I know what to go back to in the future if my reading aids need tuning up. It's unlikely I'll have more to say on this, I have too much to learn.

October 09, 2009

I promised James Bradley I would post this when he twittered in disbelief earlier this week that there are Twitter novels. I'm quoting from the first chapter of Alexandra Johnson's Leaving A Trace: On Keeping A Journal, the first chapter of which can be found here.

This is the excerpt I've printed out and stuck in a commonplace book - James, N.B. the bolded section, which for some reason made me think of your raised eyebrows. I also like Mansfield's quoted remark at the end.

Ten million blank journals are sold annually in stationery stores alone. Two million in specialty stores. Thanks to secret passwords and specialized software, an estimated four million scribblers keep some form of journal on a computer. If the information age has spawned a hunger for connection (and privacy), so, too, a need for the quickest way to access interior life. Web sites pop up daily. Our accelerated global age has left little time to slow down and reflect. In Japan, for example, those too busy to keep journals phone in their entries. At the end of the month, a company sends a bound transcript.

Familiar with the statistics, I also know how hard it is for many to keep journals. Yet when I ask people, as I often do, who they wish had kept a diary, a torrent of names is unleashed — my mother, my husband, my sister, the uncle whom I'm named after, the father I never knew. Why then the resistance to keeping them ourselves? Virginia Woolf put her finger on it best perhaps, when she asked her own diary: "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?"; Whom does one write for? Oneself, of course. "True to oneself — which self" asked Woolf's friend and archrival, Katherine Mansfield. (In her journal, she confessed that a single day's "thousands of selves" made her feel like a hotel clerk busy handing keys to the psyche's "willful guests.")

October 08, 2009

Some notes on Lisa Dempster's book Neon Pilgrim (Aduki Press, 2009)

Although talking to her online and at a couple of launches, and hearing her speak at EWF, makes me feel that I know Lisa Dempster a little, it is only in reading her first, tough little book, this travelogue called Neon Pilgrim, that I feel several layers of her lie uncovered to all comers, in much the same way she slept out in the open in rudimentary shelters during most of her 1200 kilometre trek around Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan.

I feel a bit shy offering this reading, too, as Aduki kindly offered me a copy and I completely forgot how rarely I read contemporary travel writing - it is hardly fair to compare a work like Neon Pilgrim to In Patagonia, and I hope I'm not doing that unconsciously here.

Taking her cue from a seminal English-language account of the 88 Temple Pilgrimage, Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler, which she picked up in a small community library in the midst of a bout of depression and social withdrawal, Dempster returned to the island she had spent her sixteenth year in as an exchange student to take up a pilgrim's staff, don a white vest and walk herself back to health. This spiritual and physical exercise not only caused her to lose ten kilos in fifty-odd days but clearly changed her life as well. There is naturally a strong emphasis on physical struggle in this book, and that is part of its rugged charm.